OH dear. I suspect you may have goofed. I haven't done a search but it sounds like a program for making brushes perhaps. Photoshop would have been what you may have been looking for. Try doing a seach and investigate.

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OH dear. I suspect you may have goofed. I haven't done a search but it sounds like a program for making brushes perhaps. Photoshop would have been what you may have been looking for. Try doing a seach and investigate.

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Don't panic. Here's the deal. Photobrush will do every thing that Photoshop does. The difference between Real Draw and Photobrush is that Photobrush is more of a picture editing program. But it does incredible things, including many of the stuff Real Draw does. And Photobrush uses outside filters. So, anything you can do to a picture with Photoshop, you can do it in Photobrush. Plus, it has a texture picker. You can actually pick a texture from the picture and use it to paint another area.

The reason I use Real Draw is because it works with vectors, and I can create many things from scratch. If you have specific questions on Photobrush, I will help you.

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I have been using Photobrush for a few years now, and bought it even though I have Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. It is a powerful editing program, but will not erase backgrounds. If you need transparency, use RealDraw. There are alot of built in filters and you can use the other plugins as well. For the price, it really has alot of power.

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Photobrush, at least the current version, does not support layers. If you don't want to spend any more money, you may want to download GIMP as it is free and supports layering and transparency.

But since you said you already have RealDraw, it supports layering and transparency, bitmap and vector. You can even do some photo editing in RealDraw, but since you have photobrush, you can do it there.

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PhotoBrush is primarily slanted toward the needs of digital photography. Ease of use is always debatable, but since I began using it around 2001 or so, I've always found it easier to do photo editing in PB than in PhotoShop or Corel PhotoPaint. Paint Shop Pro I don't know and can't contrast to PB.

By the way, the Selection capability allows you to erase backgrounds. You can also pinpoint areas you want to alter (for example, with filters) and/or fence off areas you do NOT want to alter -- in other words, create masks.

Many long-time users (me included) have been urging the addition of layers for years. It is a major lack. But, as people have said, you can do some nifty digital editing on photos and bitmap drawings, then copy the results over to Real Draw, where every object becomes its own layer.

As a second-to-last feature mention, the photo reduction in PhotoBrush is far superior to any other program I've used. Where you need to make a big picture small (or smaller), PB is unbeatable. Where you need to make a small picture larger -- usually a disaster -- if you increase size by 10% multiple times, you can greatly increase the size of an image... of course, an original that's too small or at too low a resolution is still a disaster, because you can't add details that aren't there at all.

And the last? I've never found better sharpening options than in PB. That includes GIMP, which almost equals PB in this regard. You can (of course) sharpen in the conventional sense of making edges and details pop, but you can also virtually remove haze from landscapes and dramatically increase contrast in washed out pictures.

For underexposed pictures or pictures where light areas have made dark areas appear dense and black, you can easily use 3 tools (Brightness & Contrast, Adjust Levels, and Large Radius Unsharp Mask) to bring all sorts of details out of the darkness. Most other image editors have these tools, but none that I've found are as easy to use as in PB, where you see the results of settings in the full size image before applying them.

PS: As with Granny, if you have any questions, just email me or PM (though I'm not often here these days).

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Thank you both por posting the additional information. I have Photobrush, but haven't used it in years since I mostly work with vectors. I looked at it again yesterday, after I promised to help Texaslady, and was blown away by all the improvements and additions. Bottom line... I got to learn it all over again. Still, there might be things I can help you with.

The great thing about PhotoBrush is that it has support for all the outside filters. You can easily make images in RD, import them into PB, and use the outside filters, to make burn edges, page curls and folds, and all kinds of things. And the help manual is very helpful.

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Clarification and correction to my post above: (thanks MommaBird for pointing this out) - you cannot get transparency in Photo Brush.

You can erase the background of a photo using Photo Brush's selection tools, but... it requires a couple of steps: select what you want to keep, copy to the clipboard the Floater that the selection tool creates, make a new Photo Brush file and paste the Floater... but the resulting new file has white where you might want to have transparency.

That's not a problem when this new file is brought into Real Draw, because you can apply transparency to the white in RD... but the upshot is that it's a multiple-step process.

There are no corresponding set of selection tools in Real Draw, other than the little-known Color Transparency picker in the top toolbar, which is a combined magic wand selection + instant transparency tool.

Dave

P.S. MommaBird's excellent point in post #10 is something I never thought of. I don't know why, because Corel PhotoPaint falls over all the time, and that was one of the reasons I went with Photo Brush in the first place!